It's all my fault
I must have
done somebody wrong
Oh yeah ...

So following to what you wrote above.Can we actually escape from the mechanical way we see the nature??Can we Indeed build-invent a device that can actually give us a different from "yes or no" answer??
— dimosthenis9

I would say that misses the point. From the point of view of semiosis as a theory of meaning, our great advantage – what makes us intelligent organisms – is that we can actually impose a logical framework of counterfactuality on our environments. It is by finding ways to reduce our environments to numbers on dials that we can actually then model it in ways that are of maximal interest to us.

Peircean semiotics in particular – or what we called the modelling relation in theoretical biology – is about constructing a model of the world with us in it. An Umwelt. So it is the "us" that is constructed along with the "that" which is outside us. Our model is thus a meaningful relationship because both self and world are what are being represented, and indeed created. We experience a world as a place ripe with all its potential to serve our interests. We are as central to the model making as the world.

From that point of view, we don't want to transcend the limits of our experience for any good reason. We have the opposite desire of wanting to make the world ever more like our rationalising model of it.

So semiosis - as the modelling relation that gave rise to life and mind as evolutionary structures – is founded on four main levels of code. Genes and neurons take care of biology. Words and numbers take care of human sociology – our existence as cultural creatures.

Evolution shaped our neurobiology and gave us our sense organs. They were exactly whatever were needed to decode our environments at the time – set up a rational self~world relation where we just have to look or listen and it all makes pragmatic sense. Our senses break everything into a world of threats and promises, with us at its centre as a choice maker with some list of priorities, some collection of skilled habits.

Then humans invented a more abstract form of semiotic world modelling based on language. Then later on, mathematics.

And once we had maths, we could go full logical. We could reduce the self in the model to some universal notion of an observer. We could reduce the world in the model to some set of crisp measurement values. We arrive at the scientific method with its formal theories and instruments designed to reduce the material world to a data set.

The eyes only need to be able to read the numbers on the dials. Our senses needed to be limited, not expanded. At least to see reality at this mathematical level of the self~world relation.

[ ... ]

Maths is the natural culmination of an evolutionary process. It is semiosis taken to its most abstracted level. And a new kind of self has to emerge to be able to live in such a world. For this world to make sense, we need to remake ourselves as that kind of intelligence.

This is a thought that horrifies many. But it is why education pushes at least the basics of logic, maths, critical thinking and a scientific attitude so hard.

As a biosemiotician, I both accept and criticise this outcome. I say this is both nature at work, doing its thing – an evolutionary trajectory. But also, the four levels of semiosis might not be all that well integrated with each other given the rocketing trajectory of Homo sapiens and its semiotic development.

As individuals, we all have to integrate our various levels of semiosis – from genes, to neurons, to words, to numbers. But that is quite a project when our linguistic and numeric selves are still transforming our worlds at an accelerating pace.

So why do we all need to be finding our answers to the biggest possible metaphysical and scientific questions? What point is there in that, and what kind of selves would that then create? That's an interesting discussion in itself.

But what I'm saying is that you have shifted the discussion from ontology to epistemology now. Which is fine as the OP is also about epistemic good practice. It is about why science demands full mathematical rigour and how much room that then leaves for unstructured "metaphysics" – that being then another way of saying you want to reduce knowledge of the world back down to biological sense data. You want to be able to picture something solid and real like billiard balls cannoning around a table.

But my definition of metaphysics would be stricter – more mathematical. Metaphysics is about seeking the logical structure that could produce a reality in some self-creating or self-necessitating way.

[ ... ]

Semiotics is all about imposing a rational frame on the world. That is how we then deal with the quantum world. We impose a machinery of counterfactual measurements that achieve an effective collapse. To collapse just means the world is so thermally constrained that its indeterminacy is minimised in some way that is counterfactually useful to our thoughts.

We don't actually have to collapse to claim to make an observation. We just give nature no other choice – when it comes to the state of a switch – that it registers the digital fact of being either on or off. It returns either a 0 or a 1.

So yes, we evolved to see ourselves as objects in a world of objects. That is our neurobiological default. We see things that bump and collide in a way best interpreted as local and deterministic in their causality.

It would take a lot of training to think more contextually, structurally, or holistically about causality.

[ ... ]


Ou[r] consciousness is the sum of all four levels of semiosis or self~world making. And each level imposes its own mechanistic kind of measurements on the world.

Each level of mind has to be able to read its kind of signs. Sense data is looking for shape and movement – the object oriented point of view that sees a world in terms of rocks, tigers, wasps, rivers, hats and coats. Science seeks to reduce reality to numbers that slot into differential equations.

So it is about a reduction to the signs that make sense to the kind of self for which those signs would make sense. The measurements must be of the kind that plug most directly into the models. And in a more general sense, we become the kind of minds that see their worlds in that particular kind of light.

It is not a problem. It is how it works.

But the problem we experience as selves is the degree to which all the levels of world-making feel unintegrated.

If you don't get the maths in a personal fashion, then all you might hear is the words of those seeking to impose their more abstracted selves, and their more abstracted worlds, upon you.

Naturally there can be resentment. But also you live in a world where the maths works. All the technology that is your modern environment is constructed by that abstracted level of semiotics.

So you have to live in that world, but you can't speak its language. Frustrating.

But hey. All the confusion over quantum interpretations is evidence that even the mathematically informed are largely unsure how to integrate all the levels of semiosis themselves. There is no one community tale to tell as yet.

That is a work in progress. — apokrisis

The sistas are in
so check the frontline ...

When you're down and out
When you're on the street
When evening falls so hard
I will comfort you
I'll take your part
Oh when darkness comes
And pain is all, is all around

Four in the morning
Crapped out
Yawning
Longing my life away
I'll never worry
Why should I?
It's all gonna fade

So what do you think is the most efficient way to gain knowledge about those abstract objects? — Hello Human

What is the purpose of suffering? — Yohan

... some (too many) individuals are just congenitally miserable. — 180 Proof

The problem here I believe is that the goal of a forum ought to be to express some collective wisdom rather than provide a platform for personal opinion.

Have you ever been to speaker's corner in Hyde Park? Crackpots ranting from soapboxes as public entertainment? A sad sight.

Crackpots want all the glory for doing none of the work. — apokrisis

I don't have any particular desire for them to crack down, but from time to time I find myself wanting to at least note that a chicken is not a fish — T Clark

The knowledge of what happens does not effect the outcome of what happens. — DingoJones

I think Capitalism is pretty obvious what it is, it's more interesting to ask the question: is there an economic system past Capitalism that isn't Marxism? — Christoffer

Does The Philosophy Forum have minimum requirements for "professional credentials"? — Gnomon

Perhaps in the sense that one seeks to transcend Samsara. — Pantagruel

So it is just science doing its thing of following the evidence. Which is what makes it easy to distinguish from crackpots doing their thing. — apokrisis

Maybe, it's good that I have no professional credentials to be sullied when I express personal opinions on an internet forum.
— Gnomon

That seems like a pretty facile statement. Having no professional credentials might also mean your opinions are not credible on this subject — T Clark

Capitalism is just the free market economy. — Yohan

Another way of saying that survivability is what matters is to say the truth is what works. That's the battle cry of the pragmatist [except for e.g. Peirce & Dewey]. As far as we can tell, the theory of evolution by natural selection works. It helps us predict the future. Predicting the future makes it easier for us to survive. — T Clark

How do we decide what matters? — TiredThinker

... whatever you're doing that prevents you from killing yourself. — Albert Camus

Man is a rope, tied between beast and overman - a rope over an abyss. A dangerous across, a dangerous on-the-way, a dangerous looking-back, a dangerous shuddering and stopping. — Thus Spoke Zarathustra

the god of the gaps clearly demonstrates we worship ignorance. — Agent Smith